In Florida, the addition of Open Road Tolling (ORT) to an existing Electronic Toll Collection (ETC) mainline toll plaza decreased delay by 50 percent for manual cash customers and by 55 percent for automatic coin machine customers, and increased speed by 57 percent in the express lanes.
Date Posted
05/30/2008
Identifier
2008-B00553
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Evaluation of Impacts from Deployment of an Open Road Tolling Concept for a Mainline Toll Plaza

Summary Information

Implementation of open road tolling (ORT) can provide better performance for a toll collection facility than a conventional toll plaza design. Improvements have been sought to decrease toll transaction times so drivers experience reduced delays or none at all. Though ITS technology such as automatic vehicle identification (AVI) in the form of electronic toll collection (ETC) was a concept that has revolutionized toll collection, with the ever increasing traffic volumes on toll facilities, more innovative methods such as ORT are being deployed. Agencies around the world have implemented ORT and some have integrated express (high speed) ETC lanes in their normal plaza design.

Open Road Tolling and express ETC were implemented at the University Toll Plaza in the summer of 2003. Twenty months of data were collected at intervals prior to any construction, during construction, just after construction was completed and then again a few months later. To complete the evaluation of the new plaza design, the TPSIM computer simulation model was utilized. TPSIM is the Toll Plaza Simulation model developed by the University of Central Florida’s Transportation Systems Institute. Delays at the plaza decreased substantially after implementation compared to the evaluation results prior to construction.

FINDINGS
  • The analysis showed average reduced delays for manual cash customers by 49.8 percent, for Automatic Coin Machine (ACM) customers by 55.3 percent, and increased the speed by 57 percent in the express ETC lanes.
This case study provided conclusive results that implementation of ORT compared to a conventional toll facility is beneficial for improving toll collection.
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